She's Coming Home, directed by Maya Dreifuss, opens this
week in Israeli movie theaters. The
narrative is about a 30-something woman named Michal who is at the end of a
long relationship with her boyfriend. She
returns home to live with her parents in Herzliyah, supposedly to work on
writing a feature film. Ze'ev is a married man,
the principal of the local high school, and much older than Michal. When he rear ends her car, they meet and
begin a relationship.
This is a film about an adult woman's difficulties living in
her childhood home with her parents -- it's not surprising that she would come
home and not have any privacy and be shocked to notice little things about her parents
and their relationship that she hadn't noticed before. This part of the film is
filled with humor and much insight and quite well-constructed.
However, it's also a film that is making a comment about a
woman's self- empowerment -- or lack thereof -- about power games between a man
and woman. This part of the film is
not easy to watch and honestly, quite infuriating and troubling, since the sex scenes (which seem to abound) reflect the use of violence as an abusive tool in a relationship.
The film won an award at the Jerusalem International Film Festival, 2013. The comments of the jury were as follows:
the jury has selected a bold, unsettling work that challenges the audience to continually re-orient its relationship to its fascinating if often enigmatic characters.
The film stars Tali Sharon as Michal, Alon Aboutboul as the
older man and Liora Rivlin as Michal's doting mother.
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